Photographs, by William Klein (; two volumes, slip-cased; 224 pages; $85). If pictures could speak Italian, they would look like what we see in this book. In 1956, right after his gritty "New York" album appeared, Klein contrived to meet Federico Fellini in Paris and persuaded the maestro to hire him as a staff photographer on the production of "Nights of Cabiria." Klein moved to Italy and "soon found out," he writes, "that Romans reacted to the camera much like New Yorkers. Everyone felt they deserved to be photographed, immortalized. No why or why me." Klein may drain the glamorous of cachet, but he finds it in different keys scattered all about the human landscape of the Eternal City.
The late Irving Penn (1917-2009) began this series of portraits of artisans in 1950. The garb and tools of their labors offered a counterweight - aesthetic and perhaps moral - to the for glamour that Penn had to satisfy in his lucrative fashion magazine work. Rather than picture his subjects where they worked, Penn brought them into his studio to pose like models against a sooty gray paper background. The smoky light of his black-and-white prints makes them look like living sculpture, carved into individuality by their life experiences and their times.
A fascinating introduction to Chinese culture through the evolution of 100 significant written characters. Even the table of contents evokes something of Chinese thought with its four : Nature, Mankind, Objects and Qualities.
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